Monday, July 23, 2007

I switched off the telly six years ago. The radio i have not listened to for 3 months and i don't read newspapers. When one is without these magic boxes and props for enough time, the quotidian need for their affect dissolves, and the media mist melts away as one begins to see the light of what's important in ones life much more clearly.

And as one views the merry go round of irrellevant information from the vantage point of a detached observer, one identifies how subtley the sublimation of corporate dream permeates the greater consciousness of those still in thrall to the electronica of a cod reality on which the axis of consumerism turns; the image being all.

And at the heart of the ideal image, the elixir of contemporary existence, is a seeking of eternity. And be it the middle aged looker whose wish was cooked up in the fictional swirl of absent electronic realities of an unreal and therefore unobtainable femminine beauty - who attempts to reverse the revolution of the spheres above her by a continual round of nip and tick, lypo and hoovering fat from her wrinkly crumpling body; or a shallow and confused young person building their myspace shrine on nought but a portfolio of computer enhanced images with which they seek to fool others; the impetus behind this desire is acquisition of the elixir of Self, found only in a mythical pool of eternal life.

Self does not exist except in sir scum snoot cocker, pervading snout in the exterior consciousness, waking a world of mammon and its manifestation - according to Shelley - is material wealth as - cash - which he was born to spend prodigiously on his many whim and fancies.

So can we trust this voice; so haunting and really, attractive to us as Art, when the ego had been removed, the force of disorder from which this massive beauty - the eternal literate Love - had ceased moving in spin with the spheres above him as he breathed back then an all..for when Shelley is apprehended by the purest of critical eye, the mauling and assaults he suffered in print, the response to his Literacy by - essentially, and clearly obvious now - men possessing the lesser and therefore, the minor talent his poetic orbit forced to overshadow in their consciousness, who were - naturally, as a result of jealousy - non-affirmational as the hacking critics during the shared time they spend, creating beauty, or nea - time and the cooler eye decides - not the outraged bores who surrounded him as he surrounded himself with a band of willing women and engaged in debauchary of infamous and fat to purile a kind for the rare strained Love poet to dander too long, for fear of the shelley mythos being removed.

If we knew the truth of all artists, the world would be a poorer place for it, or rather, the potential there work has for the fosterage of Hope and Love, peace, effectively, however disconncted, for poetry such as Shelleys - though i know little - does have this eternal beauty; and the clincher is his defense of it.

In this chapbook of prose, his verbal invention is simply - stunning - and though it is a full skim and scroll, before we get to stroll through and recognise the part, the craft on which it resides, entering shelley's mind effectively, as in understanding the state of his psyche at the time of its composition.

Only a mind of similar poetic capacity can cognise the true poetry, the scraps and grails, the two word combination that is uniquely coined by the me, but as it is so unique - effectively unbeatable - two words, nouns are the creme de la..verbs their mirror..knack and know..not the best, but two inique verbs in that combination, as in returning zero when googled in parenthisis, self legendary, poet at home understanding Horace, who most serious lyric leaning poets have as the template.

Even if they have not read him, when his defense or book on the Art of poetry was written two milennia back an all - it is fair to say - is completely congruent still and horace would heartily endorse this innovative electronic method of making up the math - metric - as and with owt going, anything the creative mind can usefully harness and utilise in a clearly demonstrable logical way of sense'ness, knack and know, the learnt kink, and straight line within which comes after many years of developing a trust system, the essential You as artict and creator..indeed at times, Creator even, in control of the gravitas..you in exostential reality being in the readers' head and wotnot.

And for Shelley, Percy the poet..yet still his rakish'ness, his nihilism is upheld - or rather - the mirror of his literate Art is turned to us for a manifesto of beauty, though it be writ by a profligerate drunk and drug taking shambles of human reality.

Yet still, shelley spoke beautifully. Behind the mask, the man we all want to hate for being such an unproductive moral specimen - as in - that Shelley is still a respectable template for the Love poet, means what..?

Offering up ones spiritual energy to cold hard inanimate objects, in a prayer for material acquisition; instead of cultivating a need for few material objects beyond clothes and computer to be happy with as a human being standing up unafraid to announce to society, this is moi; is beyond all but the best of committed bores.

Only a few reach this rare height of eloquence and contentment; unbowed or apologising for possessing a happiness based on nought but air, imagination and the full force of divine focus found within, after many years contemplation and study of Britian's native poetic lore.

We understand that it is Self which demands the attention of other eyes in the concert and theatre of ones daily flit through the ephemera which constitute the events forming a sound to which we dance in the happening of our brief cognisance of the waking consciousness that is life itself. And blindly, unthinkingly we herd and moo, calling to others in the random sink and rise of existence, occassionally snagged by a fleeting physical attraction to the mugshots and minds acting upon a greater stage here on my blog, where you rehearse your realities for me, in deed and print; occassional deigning to take things further in the search for Love.

Love. The divisible sum into which we all are but a miniscule part; our pyschological intent forming a figure, whose tiny weight is nevertheless, a cog and computing part - however small and brief - which impacts on reality, measured accuratley or nea; in our lifetime or not. It does not matter, as long as one is happy, and cheerful in the fray; uncomplaining when we get binned off and rejected by others. For this a par for ones course and what makes people love us more, is when they see we are not arsed about their opinion; as we do what we do regardless of any and all opinion.

Only once this nut is cracked and understood; when a full cognisance of the word "craic" is known, can we fly. Ignored or elevated, all of us execute a role. By necessity, a self created part, starting as a seed of dream first stirred in the cauldron of our childhood; in the raw first mix which casts the hue and potential register of our mature mindset, voice and song.

Each sound, each word, each pause for breath, is a singular event and letter apart, in the wider frame of human history that - by armeggedon or earthly paradise - will be nought but a poem itself; each life a letter, word and line of the greater whole. And yet still the full of human history is but a brief drop in the wider universal force of which we are both all and nothing; centre and furthest dernier, simultaneously existing in a way only Art can hint of, capture and portray.

For a thousand biblical books and a million moleculer boasts of knowing, can never convey the rose of life whose bloom is forever frozen in the mind as a cipher for eternity. The pale pink or full lipped red of an acorn crop of severed heads held in the beak of the raven and war goddess Morrigan, who swooped to the shoulder of the Ulaid peoples' undisputed warrior star, Cúchulainn; tied to a pillar to die standing up, after being mortally wounded by his foe the prince of Munster, Lugaid; avenging his fathers death.

Cúchulainn is the de facto hardest man in the island's myth. His life was a succession of challenge and slaughter of warrior foe from competeing war bands, of the Connachta to the West and Munster to the South. One after another - as was cultural practice then around the time of Jesus - the various champions of single combat were slain and fell at the feet of this half man, half god superbeing; until the time and death of his prophecy occured and life and time carried on, as always it does.

And this figure left behind him, not only the immortal quote all modern poets agree has never been bettered in 2000 years for as an accurate definition as there is for poetry -

"the music of what happens" - but also the beau ideal which moved at the centre of Yeats' dream:

"I care not if i day today or tommorow, only that my doings live on in myth after i'm gone."

And this iron age nobility, source of the terrible beauty and dead warriors standing up beneath ben bullen like a chinese army of terrocotta, clay soldiers; all mix in the jumble of fact and invention Yeats assembled into his vision, philosophy drawn from the pages time forgot, that weighted his verse and continues to confuse all but the most inquiring of poetic minds.

And like the poet in his round tower as Robartes and Ahern pass on the moonlit night, cackling at the fool cracking his wits on a meaningless conundrum in which all reason is absent and can never be attached; so too our search for Love in the material physical world will never yield it in the baubles we expend so much effort on acquiring.

For we can not love a man bag, car, house or yacht in the way as we do one another. Humanity wins every time. The cerebral over flesh, and even the most astonishing of blooms fade to ropey aul bags, unless they are lucky and the eyes of an angel burn in their heads at a hundred years of age. Far and few between but still, if ever witnessed, a touch of divinity to speak of and prove ones contention of Self to self with.

The potter and his clay, a poet and his pen, the Self creating force of nature is but a sublimation of the light all life is but a derivative of, and which all our hope and wish to be a toffie makes a Self with. And our desire to Love honestly results in Self being outfaced and shrink in the simplest of con, discovered after the most difficult ascent up the mountain of fact and ephemera which terminate at the peak of knowing.

For when we study letter lore, we all can reach the.. shh..of Self shrunk self being proffered as a true stay and plea from an honest single poet in straight talk looking for online Love with another.

The human source of sun, our closest hand and orb that spun us to existence and - i beleive - mixed with the magic ingredient of eternity; is the soul of self-shrunk Self. The hardest trick to sight in the hall of smoke and mirror, placebo and sleight of hand that would effect us to believe HP potter-sauce is our be all and end all of contemporary literate existence.

And yet still, the corporate machine proves there is and always will be a need and ready supply of common humanity willing to bond over a dream of writers we elevate to fulfill the role of our fictional gods in the citadel of Literacy from which we self-exclude when the Self is still motoring at our greediest core.

Sheep in wolves clothing, lovers all, some pretending to be hard nosed rakehelly boy galloglass and kern, wishing only to die standing up and facing ones foe like Cúchulainn, as the brave and fearless Men of Self, for Wodin, Lugh and Appollo. But surely the truth is we are all more cowardly than this; more Mr Bean than James Bond?

For the half god, half man is a fiction and fallacy; maybe a cipher and unreachable bar or role model our peers present as the great noble idea of Self. The surface of self in full puff and bluster, being a fanstasy and fiction, we forget to initially cap our boasting desire in the first flush when all around us is night, as the tv man is telling us about the babes and billions a life of swearing in fast rhyme bestow upon the killer.

A Cúchulainn who doesn't exists except in a dream; attempting to be sold via the magic of quantuum physics and technolgical trickery, as the answer to a way out of a mindset that can never be so until Love replaces the desire for death to they who live next door or beside us in the bed of whatever this thing of "now" is..

Lucky we for the life we have, lets thank benevolence for being..today and tommorow we can make up..the past is a tablet to draw hope from..remember the silence and use it to make others hear what sorrow and suffering the ghost within we can never outface, weights our gravitas. The pyramid of ghosts on which we breathe, their past funnelled in through us, to sing of or nea in lay and rann. Wrought the poem from our past of silence and the invisible voice of lives who fought for justice against tyrants whose English speech sought nought but injustice and murder of an ancient language; but from whose ashes rose a phoenix in at least one defiant native, who wrought a way of expressing them in english.

Learning to initially cap the Self before prophecy and the death of one small link who puzzled for them in a deep beyond; caught a glimpse of where their souls are hung and bound as one, and will return to hang with when his song is sung and life reclaimed by light to noise as air in graceful freedom, sounding in the tune of dust i will become.

For we all wish to be Cúchulainn; warrior bard who was not only the most handsome and strongest of fighting champions who all women hurled themselves at - unable to control their lust for him - but a bard whose bravey and skill knew no bounds; seeing his dad was Lugh, a god of light and war champ himself in the first battle of Moytura between the Tuatha Dé Dannan and Formorian.

But the island mythology is a lore in itself and such was the fear other warriors had for Cúchulainn, when his eventual killer Lugaid slew him with one from a set of three magical spears - prophesised to kill 3 kings; after the tragic prohesy attached to this figure ground out in the narrative event, Lugaid only approached Cúchulainn after the great phantom queen in her shape of the raven and war goddess, Morrigan; had landed on his shoulder, signalling he was dead; tied to his stone after being fatally wounded by a magic spear, to die with the dignity one expects the ultimate arch warrior in Ulster myth be accorded.

But still the spirit and phantoms, the force of life that is exhaustively documented here but which few care to seek the true knowledge from, had a trick up their sleeve; fulfilling the other bore who said of the place:

The predictable never happens, the unexpected always.

Indeed this is the only guarantee one has in the home of didlee dee, where minute by minute things change; and as Lugaid severed his head, Cúchulainn's sword dropped, severing Lugaid's own hand, and then the tale continues anew with Cúchulainn's best mate in the war band avenging his death. And also, as usual, Lugaid severed head was the noble spoil , stock and proof of his slayer's prowess in this society of such terrible beauty.

Indeed Conall Cernach - who avenged the golden boy of irish myth - was one of the very few in it who lived out a normal span; Cúchulainn was dead by 30, much as many of the young men on the island today who choose to live by a similar code of cyclical death and revenge. The fear of Failure in the sight of others, incarnate and heaped into us by an incessant shower of electronic reality too perfect for man to mirror.

And so we pretend to be the ideal man whose child is hidden behind an unreadable brow and straight pursed lips, reflecting the mien of a lonely man whose chimera's an act and con; until Self sinks and disappears completely, when we reach the rock bottom of our self created sorrow, and Love appears in the moment least expected, to draw us up and clear the féath fíadha, or mist of invisibility and irrellevance, guiding our hand along a page. Both within and without, divinity and man exists, and our trick of balancing light and shadow, is a voice within few attempt to find and sing with.

The natural run, harmonic fact, words and sound collide as an acoustic picture and the moment; slowly, surely and without fuss, will become yours and define you to others who profess to know what the net is all about..